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VMWareVirtual Infrastructure
What is a Virtual Infrastructure?
Structurally, a virtual infrastructure consists of the following components:
By decoupling the entire software environment from its underlying hardware infrastructure, virtualization enables the aggregation of multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks into shared pools of resources that can be delivered dynamically, securely and reliably to applications as needed. This pioneering approach enables organizations to build a computing infrastructure with high levels of utilization, availability, automation and flexibility using building blocks of inexpensive industry-standard servers. Virtual Infrastructure BenefitsVMware has made it possible to fully realize the enormous benefits of virtualization in production-scale IT environments by building virtual infrastructure automation and management capabilities around a best-in-class hypervisor. In fact, 86% of VMware customers use virtualization in production and 43% deploy most new production applications in virtual machines. VMware virtual infrastructure solutions are ideal for production environments in part because they run on industry-standard servers and desktops and support a wide range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructure. We have designed our solutions to function independently of the hardware and operating system to provide customers with a broad platform choice. As a result, our solutions provide a key integration point for hardware and infrastructure management vendors to deliver differentiated value that can be applied uniformly across all application and operating system environments. VMware customers who have adopted our virtual infrastructure solutions have reported dramatic results, including:
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The introduction of virtualization technology presents a number of opportunities for driving capital and operational efficiency above and beyond the simple benefit of safe partitioning. VMware's customers have harnessed the power of virtualization to better manage IT capacity, to provide better service levels, and to streamline IT processes. We have coined a term for virtualizing the IT infrastructure–we call it the virtual infrastructure. 
In essence, a virtual infrastructure is a dynamic mapping of physical resources to business needs. While a virtual machine represents the physical resources of a single computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the physical resources of the entire IT environment, aggregating x86 computers and their attached network and storage into a unified pool of IT resources.
